Rounders
Matt Damon as a reformed card shark pulled back to the table, Edward Norton as the friend who keeps dragging him there, and John Malkovich chewing Oreos as a Russian mobster named Teddy KGB. A modest 1998 release that a generation of poker players later adopted as their sacred text.
Rounders reached theaters September 11, 1998, directed by John Dahl: Matt Damon plays Mike McDermott, a law student and gifted poker player who swears off the game after losing his whole bankroll to the Russian mobster Teddy KGB — played by John Malkovich behind a thick accent and a tell involving Oreo cookies — only to be pulled back in to bail out his reckless friend Worm (Edward Norton). Made for about $12 million, it earned a modest $22.9 million domestically to mixed reviews.
The film's real life began years later. As online poker and televised Texas hold'em exploded in the early 2000s, Rounders became the canonical poker movie — the one working pros cited as the thing that hooked them, quoting Teddy KGB and Mike's narration about reading the players instead of the cards. What passed quietly through theaters as a 1998 drama became, by the poker boom, a piece of scripture for a whole subculture.
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